Manchu-Tungus languages

Manchu-Tungus languages, also called Tungusic languages, smallest of three subfamilies of the Altaic language family. The Manchu-Tungus languages are a group of 10 to 17 languages spoken by fewer than 70,000 people scattered across a vast region that stretches from northern China across Mongolia to the northern boundary of Russia. Apart from the moribund Manchu and the now-extinct Juchen (Jurchen) languages, these languages have not been written. Relatively little is understood about the historical development of individual members of Manchu-Tungus or the relationships among them. This state of ignorance is likely to endure because most of the languages are extinct or near extinction.

Historically, the Manchu-Tungus peoples lived in fishing communities along the Pacific coast of Asia or formed nomadic bands of hunters and reindeer herders. The latter occupations could support only a limited number of individuals, with the result that hunting bands were small. The linguistic consequence of this scattered and only loosely associated social organization was extensive dialect differentiation. Because the language versus dialect distinction is often unclear, the precise number of Manchu-Tungus languages currently spoken is uncertain.

Linguistic history

The oldest attested member of the Manchu-Tungus family is Juchen (Jurchen), which was spoken by the founders of the Chin dynasty (1115–1234) in northern China. Almost nothing is known about this now-extinct language because few examples of written Juchen remain, these being inscriptions on stelae found in Manchuria and Korea. Juchen script was borrowed from the Khitan, a people whose empire the Juchen overthrew, but the Khitan writing system was altered to resemble Chinese characters more closely.

Perhaps the most familiar member of the Manchu-Tungus family is Manchu, the language of the Ch’ing dynasty of China (1644–1911/12). Although the language had official status and a written form, its use in the Ch’ing empire steadily diminished owing to the pervasiveness of Chinese in daily affairs. A voluminous corpus of written Manchu from this period consists chiefly of official documents written bilingually in Manchu and Chinese and of translations from Chinese literature. The Manchu people were so thoroughly Sinicized that, by the time of the Ch’ing dynasty’s collapse in the early 20th century, a culturally or linguistically distinct Manchu community had virtually ceased to exist. As of 1982, reports listed only 70 elderly speakers of the language.

The vitality of all the Manchu-Tungus languages is in rapid decline. Speakers are bilingual in Russian, Mandarin Chinese, or minority languages, and in most cases, younger members of the communities have limited aptitude in their traditional language. In small part, this decline in use can be traced to the numerical and cultural dominance of Russian and Chinese speakers in the areas where Manchu-Tungus languages are found. The more direct causes of Manchu-Tungus obsolescence, however, were deliberate government policies of Russification and Sinicization. During Stalin’s era, for example, all cultural and linguistic diversity was suppressed in an attempt to create a homogeneous Soviet population. The traditionally nomadic Tungus peoples were forced to settle and were relocated in regions dominated by ethnic Russians. Their deer herds were collectivized. The Russian language was unofficially promoted as the sole medium of instruction in the schools, and in larger villages a boarding-school system was organized in which children from ages 1 to 15 were removed from their homes for six days a week. This system thus produced several generations of Tungus people who had no understanding of their traditional culture or language.

Classification and linguistic characteristics

Linguistic description of the Manchu-Tungus languages dates to only the middle of the 19th century, but by the 1950s linguists had reached a general consensus that the family consisted of two branches, a Southern (Manchu) group and a Northern (Tungus) group. This broad picture of the Manchu-Tungus languages, laid out in detail by the Russian linguist V.I. Cincius (1949) and the German linguist Johannes Benzing (1955), is based on several linguistic features that typically differentiate the two groups. The Tungus languages exhibit a contrast between short and long vowels; Manchu on the other hand does not exhibit a contrast in vowel length but is characterized by vowel clusters (e.g., Manchu uihe versus Oroqen iige ‘horn’). Word initial f in Manchu corresponds to an initial vowel in Tungus (Manchu fulha versus Solon ula ‘poplar’).

With respect to morphology, Tungus languages, but not Manchu, have a highly developed system of nominal suffixes which indicate possession (Oroqen murin-iw ‘horse-my,’ murin-iy ‘horse-your,’ murin-in ‘horse-his,’ etc.). Similarly, the use of case inflections is more prominent in Tungus. For example, Evenk has at least 11 distinct case suffixes, whereas written Manchu has 4 (Evenk bira-wa ‘river [accusative],’ bira-du ‘river-on,’ bira-la ‘river-in,’ etc.). Finally, Tungus languages exhibit subject agreement on verbal forms, but Manchu does not.

Although the division between Southern and Northern branches is theoretically well established, the assignment of individual languages to one of the branches is in many cases controversial because certain languages have characteristics of both. For example, Ho-chen (Hezhe), usually considered a dialect of Nanai, is phonologically similar to the Manchu group, but morphologically similar to the Tungus group. This ambiguity has led some scholars to propose a third branch, the Central group, for Manchu-Tungus languages. Undoubtedly, the patterns of contact with other languages have helped to obscure the genetic affiliations of the Manchu-Tungus languages. Members of the Southern group have been affected in varying degrees by Chinese, while members of the Northern group have been particularly influenced by Russian and Mongolian languages.

A complete classification of the Manchu-Tungus family is hampered by many obstacles. Historical comparison is impossible, because only Manchu and Juchen have literary traditions that predate the 20th century; many contemporary Manchu-Tungus languages still lack a written form. Further, the Northern branch of the family is characterized by extreme dialectization, so that even Udihe—said to be spoken by only 100 individuals—is said to have at least seven varieties. Last, the paucity of published material on the languages also limits the extent to which the relationship between Manchu-Tungus and other Altaic languages can be determined.